12 killed as gunmen storm police school in Pakistan

The attackers hopped over a crumbling brick wall, wearing backpacks and belts with dangling grenades. They were young and wore beards, and by 7:30 a.m. on Monday, they were firing machine guns into an unarmed crowd of young police recruits.

Pakistan’s most populous province, Punjab, came under attack for the second time this month. This time, militants hit several hundred police cadets caught off guard during a morning drill at their academy in this village near Lahore, Punjab’s capital.

The attackers issued no demands but went on a rampage, killing at least eight recruits and instructors. One attacker was killed in the siege that followed and, in a gory finale, three detonated suicide belts, killing themselves. More than 100 people were wounded.

“They were barbaric,” a senior trainer at the center said. “They had no demands. We didn’t understand what they wanted. They just kept killing.”

The strike was aimed at killing and terrorizing future law enforcers and demonstrated once again the militants’ ability to reach deep into the Pakistani heartland.

Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state, has been mired in political wrangling since an election last year, with leaders fighting each other instead of joining efforts against the insurgency, which is slowly strangling the country. The government’s impotence will greatly complicate the Obama administration’s efforts to bring order to Afghanistan, whose militants slip through Pakistan’s porous borders.

Rehman Malik, a senior adviser in Pakistan’s Interior Ministry, said there were seven assailants. Three were arrested, he said, and four died in the siege. They rented an apartment in Lahore but came from Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas in the west, he said.

It is the same region used by the Taliban to stage attacks on American forces in Afghanistan. This time, however, Mr. Malik said that Pakistan was the victim.

“In our country, at our different borders, arms are coming in, Stinger missiles are coming in, rocket launchers are coming in, heavy equipment is coming; it should be stopped,” Mr. Malik said. “Whoever the antistate elements are, they are destabilizing the country.”

It seemed just as likely that the attacks had been perpetrated by Punjabi militant groups, like Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was blamed for the attacks last year in Mumbai, India, or Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a sectarian group that recruits in southern Punjab but in recent years moved to the tribal areas to train alongside Al Qaeda.

Mushtaq Sukhera, the deputy inspector general of investigations with the Punjab police, said that it was impossible to tell the identities of the attackers, and that they could be from a Punjab-based group.

Lashkar-e-Taiba was suspected in a similar attack this month, on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore. About a dozen attackers escaped, humiliating Pakistani authorities who seemed powerless to stop an assault on Pakistan’s most cherished pastime.

This time, elite police commandos struck back quickly, surrounding the police academy and fiercely attacking the militants. “We encircled them,” said Shahid Iqbal, deputy inspector general of operations for the Lahore Police Department, as a crowd of police officers in the background cheered “God is great” and “Long live Punjab police.”

Mr. Iqbal said, “We engaged them in the stairwells.”

The elite forces recaptured the academy by 4 p.m., after an eight-hour siege. President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani praised the security forces for what amounted to a relative success.

Some at the police academy believed that the attackers had come from Afghanistan, or at least were Pashtun, an ethnicity indigenous to tribal areas in western Pakistan.

“Afghans,” Mr. Iqbal said, flicking his wrist in a gesture of distaste. When asked what his forces found at the end of the siege, he replied: “Three bodies. Two heads.”

But many young recruits saw the attackers — who burst upon them during a recess from the drill, firing indiscriminately into a crowd of more than 700 men — and not everybody agreed they were Afghan.

Tajamul Hussein, a recruit who was part of the drill, said the attackers spoke Saraiki, a dialect of Punjabi, the local language here. He said one attacker had a very long beard.

He said they were shouting, “Oh, Red Mosque attackers, we have come,” a reference to the 2007 takeover by Pakistani authorities of a militant mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.

Monday’s siege was much shorter, but terrifying for the recruits inside, most of them no older than 20, and from small provincial towns with few job options. For them the Manawan center, one of six basic training centers in the province, is a path to social advancement, despite its decay, and lack of running water.

Adnan Ali woke with a start when bullets pierced the glass in a window near his bed. When a grenade was lobbed through a different pane, he backed away, seeing a scene of panic through the dirty glass in the parade yard just outside.

“They were lying on the ground and crawling,” he said. “They were shouting, ‘Run, run!’ ”

Muhammad Shafik, a cadet, said he was paralyzed by fear. “They started hitting people,” he said, standing in a warehouselike room that served as sleeping quarters, with hundreds of thin mattresses spread in rumpled lines on a concrete floor. “When their magazine was finished, they loaded another one and kept firing.” He added, “My mind was moving slower than my body.”

The police brought out the wounded in blue-and-gray armored personnel carriers, which the militants tried to hit with grenades from a third-floor balcony. Elite police officers returned ferocious fire each time, making a frightening din that punctuated the afternoon.

Signs of struggle were everywhere. Bullet holes had punctured green screens in upstairs windows. Broken glass crunched underfoot on stairways. A pool of blood, thickening, traced the shape of a human body on a speckled stone floor.

The police who came to the rescue were led by an elite contingent of Punjab police officers set up in 1997 as the rough equivalent of police SWAT teams in the United States, said the former inspector general of the Punjab police, Shaukat Javed. Now there are about 5,500 members, with units of 50 to 60 members based in each district of the province.

Mr. Javed said the police academy that was attacked was the least guarded of three training centers in the Lahore area. One of the facility’s trainers said that out of about 30 security guards at the complex — retired military officers with old rifles and little ammunition — just 7 were on duty.

One, named Mustafa, fought very bravely, several instructors said. The instructors on stage in front of the parade were armed only with sticks.

“What can you do with sticks?” Mr. Shafik asked, his face set in bewilderment and pain from the loss of a favorite teacher, Gulam Mohiuddin.

The attackers had more sophisticated weaponry than in past attacks, said Mr. Sukhera, the police official. A factory-made antipersonnel explosive that bore the markings Claymore Mark 5 was found near one of the dead attackers in a plastic box, said Zulifkar Hameed, an elite force member who was among the first inside.

The elite forces ultimately prevailed. But the attackers, in some respects, got their way.

“I’m not joining the police,” said an angry young recruit, Khalil Zaman. “I love my life. No one wants to be here anymore. We’re taking off our uniforms and going home.”